‘Englishness’ and the ‘Mankad’
In the months bridging 2022 and 2023, the sport of cricket – the so-called ‘gentleman’s game’ – has been riven with controversy. The most serious of these has been the racism exposed by the ex-Yorkshire County Cricket Club professional Azeem Rafiq. And yet, it may be argued that debates over a far less serious issue, the ‘Mankad’, has generated greater global debate.
The ‘Mankad’ – a bowler running out the non-striking batter during their delivery stride if they have left their crease prematurely – is named after the Indian cricketer Vinoo Mankad who dismissed the Australian Bill Brown in this way during India’s tour of Australia in 1947/8.
Although the ‘Mankad’ is a legitimate dismissal according to the Laws of cricket – a sport far too pretentious to merely have ‘rules’ – the Australian media of the time deemed this method of dismissal to be against the purported ‘spirit’ of the game. Such is the influence of this mystical concept, the Laws that were designed to govern play are frequently superseded by a host of unwritten rules even though the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the International Cricket Council (ICC), and other international boards committed the ‘Spirit of Cricket’ to paper in 2000.
While the notions of ‘fair play’ and ‘sportsmanship’ influence all sports, only cricket has attempted to make these idealised values an integral aspect of the sport’s social and cultural image. Not for nothing is cricket deemed – despite claims it is an Indian game 'accidentally discovered by the British' – the ‘quintessentially English’ game, and idioms such as ‘playing with a straight bat’ or ‘not cricket’ commonly understood.
The History of Cricket Culture
While cricket is, arguably, the most socially constructed sport in the world, its image and culture were enduringly shaped by a tiny cohort of so-called ‘gentlemen amateurs’ who not only co-opted the game during the second half of the nineteenth century, but also re-shaped it according to their own image and needs. Specifically, this distilled down to the preservation of their social status within a sporting environment ostensibly reliant upon competitive, yet ‘fair’, meritocratic outcomes.
At the heart of this transformation was the concept of amateurism. Said to be a philosophical approach to sport, amateurism emerged among the public school educated elites who ran sport in Britain. Loosely based upon a wholly disingenuous interpretation of the Classics, what Plato and Aristotle would have termed ‘good sport’ and concepts such as areté: the combined excellence of mind, body and soul (the cult of the all-rounder); agon: competition for glory and honour (but not financial reward); aesthetics or beauty, and Plato’s ideas in relation to the intrinsic, extrinsic and instrumental value of sport.
Despite aristocratic ‘gentlemen’ and working-class professionals (then referred to as ‘players’) coexisting in cricket since the eighteenth century, ever stricter forms of amateurism were deemed necessary because of the game’s expansion and increasing popularity. Not only were professionals, such as Surrey CCC’s George Lohmann, able to transcend their social position, the status of the amateurs, as the Field explained in 1913, was threatened: “There is one interesting effect of public patronage … that is, that not the professional, but the amateur also, have become in a sense ‘the servants of the public’”.
While one gentleman amateur of the period bemoaned how county cricket was “trapped by its own popularity”, aesthetic distinctions became increasingly important as portraying professional cricketers as machine-like specialists who could only do one thing well, and only for entirely mercenary reasons, gave the amateurs – even if their sporting competence were in doubt – an air of moral and philosophical superiority. They played the game for the right reasons (for the intrinsic ‘love’ of cricket), in the right way (the Corinthian ideal of fairness and honour), and in an effortless (aesthetic) style.
Unlike the aesthetics movement (1860-1900) and its call for ‘art for art’s sake’, the men advocating ‘sport for sport’s sake’ often wished to elicit an elitist outcome. Whereas the aesthetics movement — which demanded that art separate itself from the production of religious, moral or political meaning — emerged from outside the social and political elites, those who advocated amateurism in sport, such as Lord Harris, C. B. Fry, and Lord Burghley, chairman of the British Olympic Association, were the establishment.
As a result, elite sport was saddled with religious, moral, political, social and racial meaning that would shape and inform rules, institutional behaviour and orthodox histories up to the present day. More than any other sport, the contemporary culture, organisation and image of cricket has been shaped by its literature. All these factors, but class and race (and associated nationalities) especially, play a part in debates surrounding the ‘Mankad’.
Cricket, Class & Race
Because working class professionals earned a living from cricket, they were – so contemporary journalism and cricket writing often claimed – more prone to ‘playing to win’ and, in doing so, commit acts such as the ‘Mankad’ or even cheat. Yet many amateurs, most notably W. G. Grace, earned more than the professionals and stretched the game’s Laws beyond their elastic limit.
This was ideology disguised as ‘culture’ or even ‘art’. But while men such as Neville Cardus portrayed the professionals as machine-like specialists, and the amateurs as naturally gifted and graceful all-rounders, the most obvious distinction between the two classes of cricketer during the sport’s formative years was that the professionals were invariably bowlers – the game’s beasts of burden – while the amateurs were batters. This distinction lies at the heart of the ‘Mankad’, for it is the bowler who has been, in the words of ex-England captain Mike Atherton, ‘historically associated with something underhand’ when it is, in fact, the batter who is seeking an advantage by leaving their crease before the ball is bowled.
If this goes some way in explaining the class-based dimension to debates over the ‘Mankad’, race also plays a prominent role. Mankad was, after all, an Indian. This fact has surely been influential in associating his name with something underhand and unsporting. Even though Don Bradman, Australia’s captain in 1947/8, later defended Mankad’s dismissal of Brown in his autobiography, it seems unlikely that the same connotations would have been applied had an Australian ‘Mankaded’ an Indian.
Such an outcome is even less likely had an English player ever had the temerity to commit such an act. But then, the moral parameters that have shaped the culture of cricket would have made such an action almost impossible to contemplate in England. Indeed, given recent examples of ‘Mankading’, and the associated 'narrative wars', it is clear that idealised nineteenth century values that were designed to promote the erroneous idea that English cricketers, and their supporters, are somehow better people than those from abroad, remain influential.
The former was made clear in September 2022 after Deepti Sharma secured a 3-0 victory for India over England by ‘Mankading’ Charlie Dean in the final one-day international. That Dean burst into tears was but the most immediate outpouring of emotion displayed by the English during the narrative war that ensued on social media and beyond.
Indeed, the English media’s hounding of Sharma led the Indian commentator Harsha Bohgle to proclaim their complaints were not simply a ‘cultural’ issue that the English were especially prone to but one that also had a colonial dimension. He concluded: ‘It is best if those in power, or who were in power, stop believing the world must move at their bidding’.
That Ben Stokes, the England men’s captain, was upset by Bhogle’s cultural comparisons demonstrates an assumption that the culture, or ‘spirit’, of cricket is somehow universal or, at least, universally understood. In doing so, he all but proved Bhogle’s point. But his stance is entirely understandable given that the image of English cricket as something akin to a moral undertaking has been zealously protected over the last 150 years by administrators and journalists alike (often the same thing).
While the MCC, the ‘custodians of the Laws of Cricket’, have (accidentally perhaps) removed the racial dimension associated with this form of ‘run out’, as it is now known, the term ‘Mankad’ persists within popular discourse. Regrettably, the same applies, no matter how vague the concept, to English cricket’s almost maternal link to the ‘Spirit of Cricket’.
Challenging well-established traditions and values that many hold dear – or even place at the heart of their own identity – is always a difficult task. It is, however, made all the harder in English cricket because, as the historian Rowland Bowen argued as long ago as 1970, “the higher administration of the game remains in the hands of people heavily imbued with that background and those ideas”.
More that 50 years later, Bowen’s call remains valid. For the game’s administration (and literary image) in England remains in the hands of predominantly white, privately educated, men. But as much as these men, and the culture of the men’s game in England, appears to be stuck in the nineteenth century, the burgeoning women’s game offers an alternative future unincumbered by unwarranted – irrelevant even – customs and values that may well put large numbers of people off cricket (in England).
As the Indian women, at full international and under-19 level have demonstrated. Cricket, when free from toxic masculinity on one hand, and an ill-defined value-laden ‘spirit’ on the other, may well make the game more appealing to a larger, and more diverse, audience in the future.